分類：XSS

“The Daily Telegraph is a British daily morning English-language broadsheet newspaper, published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in June 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier, and since 2004 has been owned by David and Frederick Barclay. It had a daily circulation of 523,048 in March 2014, down from 552,065 in early 2013. In comparison, The Times had an average daily circulation of 400,060, down to 394,448. The Daily Telegraph has a sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, that was started in 1961, which had circulation of 418,670 as of March 2014. The two printed papers currently are run separately with different editorial staff, but there is cross-usage of stories. News articles published in either, plus online Telegraph articles, may also be published on the Telegraph Media Group’s http://www.telegraph.co.uk website, all under The Telegraph title." (From Wikipedia)

(1) Vulnerability Description:

Telegraph has a Web security bug problem. It is vulnerable to XSS attacks. In fact, all its photo pages are vulnerable to XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerabilities. Telegraph’s picture pages use “&frame" as its parameter. All its web pages use “&frame" are vulnerable to the bugs. Those vulnerabilities have been patched now.

The vulnerability can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Firefox (37.02) in Ubuntu (14.04) and IE (8.0. 7601) in Windows 7. The bugs found by using CSXDS.

(2) XSS Description:

The description of XSS is: “Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection, in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted web sites. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user within the output it generates without validating or encoding it." (OWSAP)

Website Description:“The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. The Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate “lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks", and was the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was at the outset a newspaper for women, the first to provide features especially for them, and as of the second-half of 2013 had a 54.77% female readership, the only British newspaper whose female readers constitute more than 50% of its demographic. It had an average daily circulation of 1,708,006 copies in March 2014. Between July and December 2013 it had an average daily readership of approximately 3.951 million, of whom approximately 2.503 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 1.448 million in the C2DE demographic. Its website has more than 100 million unique visitors per month." (Wikipedia)

One of its website’s Alexa rank is 93 on January 01 2015. The website is one of the most popular websites in the United Kingdom.

The Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards problem has not been patched, while the XSS problem has been patched.

(1.1) Vulnerability Description:Daily online websites have a cyber security problem. Hacker can exploit it by Open Redirect (Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards) attacks. During the tests, all Daily mail websites (Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday & Metro media group) use the same mechanism. These websites include dailymail.co.uk, thisismoney.co.uk, and mailonsunday.co.uk.

These bugs were found by using URFDS (Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards Detection System).

(1.2) Description of Open Redirect:Here is the description of Open Redirect: “A web application accepts a user-controlled input that specifies a link to an external site, and uses that link in a Redirect. This simplifies phishing attacks. An http parameter may contain a URL value and could cause the web application to redirect the request to the specified URL. By modifying the URL value to a malicious site, an attacker may successfully launch a phishing scam and steal user credentials. Because the server name in the modified link is identical to the original site, phishing attempts have a more trustworthy appearance." (From CWE)

(1.3) Vulnerability Disclosure:These vulnerabilities have not been patched.

(2) Daily Mail Website XSS Cyber Security Zero-Day Vulnerability

(2.1) Vulnerability description:DailyMail has a security problem. Criminals can exploit it by XSS attacks.

(2.2) What is XSS?“Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications. XSS enables attackers to inject client-side script into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same-origin policy. Cross-site scripting carried out on websites accounted for roughly 84% of all security vulnerabilities documented by Symantec as of 2007. Their effect may range from a petty nuisance to a significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable site and the nature of any security mitigation implemented by the site’s owner." (Wikipedia)

“KnowledgeTree is open source document management software designed for business people to use and install. Seamlessly connect people, ideas, and processes to satisfy all your collaboration, compliance, and business process requirements. KnowledgeTree works with Microsoft® Office®, Microsoft® Windows® and Linux®."

(2) Vulnerability Details:

KnowledgeTree web application has a computer security problem. Hackers can exploit it by reflected XSS cyber attacks. This may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. KnowledgeTree has patched some of them. “Bugtraq is an electronic mailing list dedicated to issues about computer security. On-topic issues are new discussions about vulnerabilities, vendor security-related announcements, methods of exploitation, and how to fix them. It is a high-volume mailing list, and almost all new vulnerabilities are discussed there.". It has listed similar exploits, such as Bugtraq (Security Focus) 32920.

“The Weather Channel is an American basic cable and satellite television channel which broadcasts weather forecasts and weather-related news and analyses, along with documentaries and entertainment programming related to weather. Launched on May 2, 1982, the channel broadcasts weather forecasts and weather-related news and analysis, along with documentaries and entertainment programming related to weather."

“As of February 2015, The Weather Channel was received by approximately 97.3 million American households that subscribe to a pay television service (83.6% of U.S. households with at least one television set), which gave it the highest national distribution of any U.S. cable channel. However, it was subsequently dropped by Verizon FiOS (losing its approximately 5.5 millions subscribers), giving the title of most distributed network to HLN. Actual viewership of the channel averaged 210,000 during 2013 and has been declining for several years. Content from The Weather Channel is available for purchase from the NBCUniversal Archives." (Wikipedia)

Vulnerability description:

The Weather Channel has a cyber security problem. Hacker can exploit it by XSS bugs.

Almost all links under the domain weather.com are vulnerable to XSS attacks. Attackers just need to add script at the end of The Weather Channel’s URLs. Then the scripts will be executed.

10 thousands of Links were tested based a self-written tool. During the tests, 76.3% of links belong to weather.com were vulnerable to XSS attacks.

The reason of this vulnerability is that Weather Channel uses URLs to construct its HTML tags without filtering malicious script codes.

The vulnerability can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Firefox (34.0) in Ubuntu (14.04) and IE (9.0.15) in Windows 8.

The Weather Channel has patched this Vulnerability in late November, 2014 (last Week). “The Full Disclosure mailing list is a public forum for detailed discussion of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques, as well as tools, papers, news, and events of interest to the community. FD differs from other security lists in its open nature and support for researchers’ right to decide how to disclose their own discovered bugs. The full disclosure movement has been credited with forcing vendors to better secure their products and to publicly acknowledge and fix flaws rather than hide them. Vendor legal intimidation and censorship attempts are not tolerated here!" A great many of the fllowing web securities have been published here, Buffer overflow, HTTP Response Splitting (CRLF), CMD Injection, SQL injection, Phishing, Cross-site scripting, CSRF, Cyber-attack, Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards, Information Leakage, Denial of Service, File Inclusion, Weak Encryption, Privilege Escalation, Directory Traversal, HTML Injection, Spam. This bug was published at The Full Disclosure in November, 2014.

“The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851, by the New York Times Company. It has won 114 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. The paper’s print version has the largest circulation of any metropolitan newspaper in the United States, and the second-largest circulation overall, behind The Wall Street Journal. It is ranked 39th in the world by circulation. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990. Nicknamed for years as “The Gray Lady", The New York Times is long regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record". It is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., (whose family (Ochs-Sulzberger) has controlled the paper for five generations, since 1896), is both the paper’s publisher and the company’s chairman. Its international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times. The paper’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page." (Wikipedia)

(1) Vulnerability Description:

The New York Times has a computer cyber security problem. Hacker can exploit its users by XSS bugs.

The code program flaw occurs at New York Times’s URLs. Nytimes (short for New York Times) uses part of the URLs to construct its pages. However, it seems that Nytimes does not filter the content used for the construction at all before 2013.

Based on Nytimes’s Design, Almost all URLs before 2013 are affected (All pages of articles). In fact, all article pages that contain “PRINT” button, “SINGLE PAGE” button, “Page *” button, “NEXT PAGE” button are affected.

Nytimes changed this mechanism since 2013. It decodes the URLs sent to its server. This makes the mechanism much safer now.

However, all URLs before 2013 are still using the old mechanism. This means almost all article pages before 2013 are still vulnerable to XSS attacks. I guess the reason Nytimes does not filter URLs before is cost. It costs too much (money & human capital) to change the database of all posted articles before.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in Web applications. XSS enables attackers to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy.

“Hackers are constantly experimenting with a wide repertoire of hacking techniques to compromise websites and web applications and make off with a treasure trove of sensitive data including credit card numbers, social security numbers and even medical records. Cross-site Scripting (also known as XSS or CSS) is generally believed to be one of the most common application layer hacking techniques Cross-site Scripting allows an attacker to embed malicious JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, HTML, or Flash into a vulnerable dynamic page to fool the user, executing the script on his machine in order to gather data. The use of XSS might compromise private information, manipulate or steal cookies, create requests that can be mistaken for those of a valid user, or execute malicious code on the end-user systems. The data is usually formatted as a hyperlink containing malicious content and which is distributed over any possible means on the internet." (Acunetix)

The vulnerability can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Firefox (34.0) in Ubuntu (14.04) and IE (9.0.15) in Windows 8.

Websites information:“lxr.mozilla.org, mxr.mozilla.org are cross references designed to display the Mozilla source code. The sources displayed are those that are currently checked in to the mainline of the mozilla.org CVS server, Mercurial Server, and Subversion Server; these pages are updated many times a day, so they should be pretty close to the latest‑and‑greatest." (from Mozilla)

“Mozilla is a free-software community which produces the Firefox web browser. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. In addition to the Firefox browser, Mozilla also produces Thunderbird, Firefox Mobile, the Firefox OS mobile operating system, the bug tracking system Bugzilla and a number of other projects." (Wikipedia)

(1) Vulnerability description:Mozilla website has a computer cyber security problem. Hacker can attack it by XSS bugs. Here is the description of XSS: “Hackers are constantly experimenting with a wide repertoire of hacking techniques to compromise websites and web applications and make off with a treasure trove of sensitive data including credit card numbers, social security numbers and even medical records. Cross-site Scripting (also known as XSS or CSS) is generally believed to be one of the most common application layer hacking techniques Cross-site Scripting allows an attacker to embed malicious JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, HTML, or Flash into a vulnerable dynamic page to fool the user, executing the script on his machine in order to gather data. The use of XSS might compromise private information, manipulate or steal cookies, create requests that can be mistaken for those of a valid user, or execute malicious code on the end-user systems. The data is usually formatted as a hyperlink containing malicious content and which is distributed over any possible means on the internet." (Acunetix)

This means all URLs under the above two domains can be used for XSS attacks targeting Mozilla’s users.

Since there are large number of pages under them. Meanwhile, the contents of the two domains vary. This makes the vulnerability very dangerous. Attackers can use different URLs to design XSS attacks to Mozilla’s variety class of users.

“The Times of India (TOI) is an Indian English-language daily newspaper. It is the third-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest selling English-language daily in the world according to Audit Bureau of Circulations (India). According to the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2012, the Times of India is the most widely read English newspaper in India with a readership of 7.643 million. This ranks the Times of India as the top English daily in India by readership. It is owned and published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. which is owned by the Sahu Jain family. In the Brand Trust Report 2012, Times of India was ranked 88th among India’s most trusted brands and subsequently, according to the Brand Trust Report 2013, Times of India was ranked 100th among India’s most trusted brands. In 2014 however, Times of India was ranked 174th among India’s most trusted brands according to the Brand Trust Report 2014, a study conducted by Trust Research Advisory." (en.Wikipedia.org)

(2) Vulnerability description:

The web application indiatimes.com online website has a security problem. Hacker can exploit it by XSS bugs.

The code flaw occurs at Indiatimes’s URL links. Indiatimes only filter part of the filenames in its website. All URLs under Indiatimes’s “photogallery" and “top-llists" topics are affected.

Indiatimes uses part of the links under “photogallery" and “top-llists" topics to construct its website content without any checking of those links at all. This mistake is very popular in nowaday websites. Developer is not security expert.

The vulnerability can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Mozilla Firefox (26.0) in Ubuntu (12.04) and Microsoft IE (9.0.15) in Windows 7.

“Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection, in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted web sites. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user within the output it generates without validating or encoding it." (OWASP)

(3) Vulnerability Disclosure:

The vulnerabilities were reported to Indiatimes in early September, 2014. However they are still unpatched.